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Sea Ice Extent Sinks To Record Lows At Both Poles (sciencedaily.com)
According to NASA, Arctic sea ice appears to have reached on March 7 a record low wintertime maximum extent. On the opposite side of the planet, Antartica ice hit its lowest extent ever recorded by satellites (since satellites began measuring sea ice in 1979) on March 3 at the end of summer in the Southern Hemisphere. Science Daily reports: Total polar sea ice covered 6.26 million square miles (16.21 million square kilometers), which is 790,000 square miles (2 million square kilometers) less than the average global minimum extent for 1981-2010 -- the equivalent of having lost a chunk of sea ice larger than Mexico. The ice floating on top of the Arctic Ocean and surrounding seas shrinks in a seasonal cycle from mid-March until mid-September. As the Arctic temperatures drop in the autumn and winter, the ice cover grows again until it reaches its yearly maximum extent, typically in March. The ring of sea ice around the Antarctic continent behaves in a similar manner, with the calendar flipped: it usually reaches its maximum in September and its minimum in February. This winter, a combination of warmer-than-average temperatures, winds unfavorable to ice expansion, and a series of storms halted sea ice growth in the Arctic. This year's maximum extent, reached on March 7 at 5.57 million square miles (14.42 million square kilometers), is 37,000 square miles (97,00 square kilometers) below the previous record low, which occurred in 2015, and 471,000 square miles (1.22 million square kilometers) smaller than the average maximum extent for 1981-2010.
It would also be a great place for all the world's refugees to go and start a new life. Global Warming could turn out to be that best thing to happen to humanity in a long time.
And what a prime opportunity with all the new refugees this will create!
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
My interest levels of sea ice have gotten to an all time record low as well.
Science is nerdy, climate records are science news. And the climate changing does in fact matter. I would say that such an article ticks all boxes of "news for nerds, stuff that matters".
If you don't like hearing about it, feel free to go to another website or simply not read and comment on the article.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I don't think "fox news" and "science" belong in the same sentence, let alone the same URL.
#DeleteFacebook
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/how-culture-clash-noaa-led-flap-over-high-profile-warming-pause-study
Aeris Died For Your Sins.
The medieval warm period did not affect sea ice at all. It also did not affect the global temperature at all. It was a localized effect in such a small area that the global average didn't even move.
Nope, nothing like this has ever happened before.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
What? You can't transport oil via the Internet!
It is a fine transport mechanism for bullshit however.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Yes, because when dealing with a complex topic, rather than listening to professionals and peer-reviewed research, I like to play amateur scientist and get all my info from blogs.
FYI, you can make your own comparison graphs here. On the about page it has links to all of the datasets, which you can download: Sea Ice Index, Near-Real-time DMSP SSM/I-SSMIS Daily Polar Gridded Sea Ice Concentrations, and the NASA-produced Sea Ice Concentrations from Nimbus-7 SMMR and DMSP SSM/I Passive Microwave Data.
As for MASIE:
Kiribati is going underwater. Does anyone else care? *sigh*
Many places will. As well, while a lot of folk are enjoying the warmer winters, and give not one tiny fuck about what is happening in other places, there are little issues that can crop up that might affect them.
Sea level rise is just one issue.
Local climate change is another. If the gulf stream is disrupted by Greenland glacier melt, the British Isles will actually get colder.
Some places will become more lush, and some places will become desert. The Sahara was once a nice place. If a natural climate shift can do that, it will be interesting to see what happens when we release all that sequestered carbon.
But especially in America, people don't give a shit about anything that isn't happening to them personally.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
This is quite possibly the stupidest response to climate related issues I've ever seen. It's very very true that the change cannot be reversed or prevented altogether, but that still doesn't mean there aren't plenty of things we can - and should - do to mitigate the effects. We can't fix everything, but if we opt to do nothing and continue business as usual with the fossil fuels for example, we can make things a lot worse,
It's psychologically appealing to lift one's hands into the air and declare that it's all fucked already and we can do nothing but sit and wait for extinction, but it's also simultaneously the intellectual equivalent of 'well, my liver's already damaged from all this drinking, so might just as well keep drinking because who cares at this point?'
Call me an idealist if you wish but even though I may never end up having kids, I still care about the continued survival of the species past the point of my own death.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
"several thousand people whom rely on the climate change scam, for their paycheck, are ramping up the BS so they can remain on the gravy train...."
It really blows my mind that people believe engineers and scientists from the best scientific organizations in the world, including NASA and NOAA are ALL in on a worldwide scam, while the companies that actually have skin in the game (oil, nat gas, coal, etc) are innocent victims. If you know any engineers (I'm an M.E.), you know they're often quite anal about technicalities and correctness. To even consider that a group, much less several groups across the globe would sacrifice their integrity for grants, or whatever, is absolutely ludicrous.
But then again, we elected Trump as president so it seems the majority of people aren't capable of rational thought.
You're not wrong about the past glacial extent. And no, the glaciers didn't disappear because of humanity, they receded well in advance of the first permanent human settlements (roughly the dawn of civilization, though humans were around well before that). And interestingly enough, global temperatures were in a (slow) cooling trend from about 7000BCE onward.
But that stopped around 1900, and the global temperature average has begun to swing sharply, at a rate that ought to be alarming, because as the graph shows, it is quite literally without precedent, in terms of the speed of the change, and shows no signs of stopping unless we take action to affect it:
https://xkcd.com/1732/
The top four comments as I write this are replies to those looking at the bright side, claiming disinterest, or arguing against the observation or its significance.
This is on slashdot. This isn't some dopey AM radio comment forum.
That's .. concerning. :(
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
The medieval warm period did not affect sea ice at all.
Probably.
It also did not affect the global temperature at all.
On your weird definition of global?
It was a localized effect in such a small area that the global average didn't even move.
No it wasn't. We just have no data about the _global_ temperature at that time, but we have reports from many places of the world, notable China and Japan that it was warmer than normal there, too. So: very likely it was at least on the northern hemisphere a global phenomenon.
So: the lack of written evidence, because we have none from Inka, Australians, Africans, does not mean it did not happen there.
And: if you talk about a/the medieval warm period, it would be cool to add which one you mean. There where three AFAICT.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You know, a thought just occurred to me.
If people can at least agree that climate change is happening (man-caused or otherwise), can we not also agree that some form of mitigation is necessary? It's not as if climate change is an unheard of thing on our planet. That's not even the issue.
Humans are unique in that we can modify an environment to suit us, but that doesn't make us any less dependant on the other species on this planet, and so it is *still* in our best interests to keep things on as much an even keel as possible.
Species evolve slowly over time. As conditions change, animals *will* evolve. But if conditions change too quickly, then there isn't enough time to adapt and species die. So we don't necessarily need to stop it... only slow it down as much as we can so that everything else can keep up and we don't risk getting ourselves taken out in the process.
This of course presumes one a) understands evolution, b) understands that climate *will* change and c) gives a shit about things beside short-term financial gain.
It's the new response. I like to call it the "Eat, Drink And Be Merry For Tomorrow We Shall Die" response, wherein the pseudo-skeptics finally concede that we're fucking up global climate, but just shrug their shoulders and go "Oh well", or pretend that they care about poor people because "OMG, if we move from oil, just imagine all those poor brown-skinned people that will be harmed!" as if they ever actually cared about vulnerable populations.
What it all really lays bare is the pure greed and nihilism of the fossil fuel lobby, oh, and the complete idiocy of morons on the Internet who follow them.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
They go something like this
There's nothing going on that would negatively affect our society
There might be something going on that would negatively affect our society, but nobody knows for certain. So, we shouldn't do anything different.
There's probably something going on that would negatively affect our society, but it would cost too much to do anything about it.
Our society is definitely in trouble, but it's too late for us to do anything about it. Everybody pray..
Of course, there are also societies described that didn't collapse, but they had a different response at some stage before the last on.